This article will help you quickly compare and evaluate the best agile product management software and other agile software product teams might need to support their product vision.
Product management benefits greatly from the adaptive, feedback-oriented approach of the agile strategy. After all, product teams will want to use a development approach that emphasizes the customer’s growing and changing needs.
The agile product management software listed below is compiled into a trustworthy selection of tools that emphasize various aspects of agile product management.
These are the 10 best apps that support an agile approach specifically for the product development cycle.
The Best Agile Product Management Tools List
Here’s a shortlist of the best agile product management apps:
Read more details about each tool below.
Agile Product Management App Key Features
- Product roadmap templates: Simple workflow requirements should be automated or sped up in the perfect agile environment; templates are one way of prioritizing agility.
- Stakeholders easily collaborate: Iteration, prioritization, and standups work best when stakeholders are given transparency on a team’s work.
- Product backlog metrics: Teams need to be able to review what items are needed and wanted so that they can quickly make judgment calls and prioritize features.
- Robust and flexible user stories: The agile process relies heavily on team members being able to understand the customer journey.
- Scrum master roles and permissions: Should the agile product development take a scrum route, being able to easily elevate a scrum master is a must.
Agile Product Management Software Comparison Criteria
What are we looking for when we select agile product management software for review? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): The user interface should highlight the priorities of an agile team: breaking a project into stages, collaborating and communicating regularly, and empowering constant iteration and feedback. Are roadmaps, task cards, comments, and alerts all readily available?
- Usability: An agile approach relies on team members being heavily self-organized. Is the tool easy for an individual to learn and troubleshoot?
- Integrations: Agile involves a lot of moving parts (roadmapping, communication, documentation, feedback, iteration), so external apps may be required to fill some roles. Does the tool easily integrate with common third-party apps that product managers already use, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Drive?
- Value for $: An agile system must be able to grow and change with the product. Does the software offer flexible, transparent, and scalable pricing to address this?
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Overviews Of The Agile Product Management Software
Here’s a brief description of each of the agile product solutions that are featured on this top 10 list.
1. ProdPad – Best for scrum development processes
ProdPad is an agile product management app that was built from the ground up by former and current product managers who understand the unique struggles of the role. ProdPad comes with lean roadmapping tools, idea tracking space, customer feedback solutions, and plenty of guides and templates to jump-start all of the above. ProdPad empowers scrum masters with easy idea prioritization and approval, backlog filter and scoring, and a feedback module.
ProdPad falters a bit when organizing and flagging larger amounts of data. For example, as you collect notes on your Ideas map it gets difficult to discern which ones you have read before and which are brand new. Additionally, a large conglomerate of Stories can create a bit too much noise, making it harder to visualize the bigger picture.
Where ProdPad excels is its low barrier to entry, welcoming newbies to the tool to get started almost immediately with minimal training. The ability to quickly and easily create professional-level visuals (stories, charts, graphs) is just as invaluable. If you are looking to capture and analyze customer feedback, you’ll love their forms, feature voting, and easy integration with customer-facing channels like Intercom and Zendesk.
ProdPad integrates with ADFS, Azure DevOps, Chrome Extension, Confluence, Doorbell.io, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Apps, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, Rally, SAML Single Sign-On, Slack, TFS, Trello, UserVoice, plus over a thousand more options through a paid plan with Zapier.
ProdPad costs from $149/month and offers a 7 to 30-day free trial that scales up when you perform certain actions in the app. They also offer a free demo.
2. CardBoard – Best for empathy maps and user stories
CardBoard is a free-to-use agile product management tool with paid plans that offer additional features, like real-time collaboration and swimlanes. They have a huge focus on story mapping, customer journeys, and personas. Detailed and intuitive templates are available to build empathy maps and user stories so that your team can quickly sketch out what your customers think, feel, say, do, want, and need.
One small downside of CardBoard is its relatively small list of third-party integrations compared to other agile product management software on this list. Additionally, the simplicity of the tool can be both a pro and a con, as it may not have the in-depth feature set needed for complex projects.
CardBoard is a solid digital replacement for teams who are used to the “sticky-notes on the wall” approach to customer stories and planning. The card-based interface is uniform, simple to read, and intuitive to customize. There is advanced functionality for those who want to dive in but anyone and everyone will be able to pick it up and understand the basics.
CardBoard integrates with JIRA and Confluence, Azure DevOps, TFS, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Rally, and VersionOne.
CardBoard costs from $8.50/user/month and has a freemium version with unlimited public (no private) boards available. Paid plans offer a 30-day free trial, as well.
3. Harvestr – Best for remote development teams
Harvestr is a product management tool with a host of agile-oriented features, like centralized multi-channel product feedback, backlog scoring, flexible stakeholder visibility, and collaborative roadmap decisioning. The Harvestr team keeps remote product management at the forefront of their development, going as far as to offer a free whitepaper on the subject. Additionally, remote product teams will particularly appreciate that every plan includes unlimited contributors.
Harvestr lacks exportable reports and roadmaps at the moment, which can put a damper on any Agile team’s communication strategy. Other than that, cons of the tool are few and far between. There is no in-app system for flagging duplicate feature requests, for example—nothing unworkable.
Harvestr has some standout features that set the tool apart from its competitors in this space, namely their feature prioritization scoring with customer and employee feedback mechanisms. This helps your team and users weigh in on what discoveries should make it onto the next product roadmap. Harvestr can also be configured to send automatic updates to sales and support teams regarding their past feature requests.
Harvestr integrates with Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Slack, Salesforce, Chrome, JIRA, Trello, GitHub, GitLab, Figma, and over two thousand more with a paid plan through Zapier.
Harvestr costs from $32/user/month and offers a free 14-day trial. They also have a free demo available to book at your leisure.
4. Delibr – Best for feature refinement
Delibr is a product document tool that connects deeply with JIRA to simplify issue tracking, ticket creation, and macro decision management. Delibr’s comprehensive outline template keeps feature refinement organized using collapsible progress steps, synced JIRA status, and a simple document interface that every stakeholder can understand at a glance. Delibr also offers a free ebook on feature document research based on 300 interviews with product managers.
Delibr struggles with text formatting (colors, cont selection, etc.) which can make it difficult to differentiate your different notes as a visual worker. They allow just the basics so far: bold and italic. Greater export opportunities (PDF, Word, Markdown, etc.) would also be welcomed.
Delibr is great for teams who rely on JIRA as the integration between the two is robust enough that a few clicks can transfer issues and tickets between the two. Users can enjoy synced JIRA status in Delibr and synced comments have been announced as an upcoming feature. You can even flag and create multiple JIRA issues at once with minimal menuing.
Delibr integrates with Jira Cloud, Slack, Confluence, and Google Drive. Not as many connections as others on this list; however, their JIRA integration is quite deep.
Delibr costs from $50/month for up to 10 users and they offer a 14-day free trial as well as a free demo for any interested parties.
5. monday.com – Best for creative teams
Monday.com is a product and project management app with a user-friendly, colorful interface enjoyed by teams from Hulu, BBC Studios, Universal, Adobe, Coca-Cola, and NBC. Monday.com offers a suite of tools for iteration planning, bug tracking, backlog items, and product roadmaps. Creative teams will appreciate their ready-made templates for creative asset requests, media coverage tracking, post production schedules, and editorial calendars.
Monday.com starts to shine in their Standard subscription tier and above, with timelines and Gantt charts only unlocking at this level. If you were looking for free Agile product management software, Monday.com is not for you–the feature limitations are too severe. However, those willing to pay will see the value returned to them, particularly in the areas of integrations and available workflow automations.
Agile teams will appreciate how easy it is to add, update, and share boards and tasks on Monday.com. Working fast and iterating often won’t be an issue when users have access to over 200 project templates and 20 preset column types. Paid plans can net you 25,000+ workflow automations per month, which can automate basic tasks as items update and change regularly. Any Agile team will appreciate the administrative support.
Monday.com integrates with Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Google calendar, Google Drive, Excel, Gmail, LinkedIn, OneDrive, Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, Zendesk, Copper, Shopify, Twilio, Stripe, Woocommerce, Pipedrive, SurveyMonkey, MailChimp, Facebook Ads, Hubspot, Typeform, ClearBit, Jotform, Box.com, Eventbrite, Gitlab, JIRA, Github, PagerDuty, Toggl, Basecamp, Asana, Trello, Harvest, Todoist, and thousands more through a paid plan with Zapier. Note that integrations are unlocked on the Standard Plan ($14/user/month) and above.
Monday.com costs from $11/user/month and offers a free 14-day trial to try before you buy. Monday.com has a freemium version of the software for up to 2 users and they offer special discounts on paid plans for students, non-profits, and NGOs.
6. Wrike – Best for integrations
Wrike is a popular project management software with an Agile product management-specific feature set that includes smart priority visualization, built-in item approvals, and advanced analytics for keen retrospectives. Wrike users can also employ workflow automation, take advantage of complete Agile support, and use templates for product launch plans. Wrike integrates easily with over 400 third-party apps and even the free plan allows basic integrations (Google Drive and MS Office 365).
One thing to note is that Wrike has limited task priority flags, meaning that you can mark an item as high priority or nothing. Agile teams may struggle with this, as they are often iterating and editing an assortment of features and fixes that require a more nuanced approach to prioritization categories. This isn’t to say that savvy teams can’t come up with their own prioritization system in Wrike but it is not built-in.
A feature that Agile teams will love about Wrike is the combination of Blueprints (self-built project templates) and Templates (Wrike-designed project templates) that can speed up your team’s ability to get started on new tasks quickly. If you have a standard system for adding a new feature, reporting a bug, or requesting other iterations, Wrike can empower you to build an appropriate job template to match your company’s processes and standards.
Wrike integrates with Salesforce, Tableau, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Sharepoint, MediaValet, Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive, Gmail, Github, JIRA, SAML Integration, Outlook, MS Project, Excel, Slack, Office Timeline, Wrike ToDo List, 365 Office 365, Dropbox, Online Document Editing, Okta Integration, Box, Active Directory Federation Services, OneLogin, PIngFederate, Shibboleth, and more using their well-documented and easy to use APIs.
Wrike is free to use for up to 5 users. Paid plans cost from $9.80/user/month and come with a 14-day free trial before you are actually charged. Business and Enterprise plans also come with a free trial of Wrike Proof, the company’s online proofing tool.
7. ClickUp – Best free agile product management software
ClickUp is an agile product management software used by the likes of Google, Airbnb, Nike, and Uber. Product managers will appreciate the ability to use custom task statuses that go above and beyond the typical RAG statuses as well as the wiki system to maintain a single source of truth for their product. ClickUp’s freemium plan is particularly generous, as they don’t have a cap on the number of active members or tasks.
Agile teams with external stakeholders and contractors may not be best suited for ClickUp’s otherwise generous freemium plan, as read-only guest permissions are limited to paid subscription tiers. This is one minor downfall in an otherwise hearty free Agile product management software. Their reporting suite is also limited to paid plans only.
ClickUp works great for Agile teams as they partially automate turning mind map nodes and email conversations into in-app tasks, creating a fast-moving and flexible way to pull your best ideas out of meetings and conversations and get to work on them immediately. Even their free plan comes with 100 mind map uses so you can give this feature a spin before committing to a paid subscription.
ClickUp integrates with Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Webhooks, EverHour, Toggl, Harvest, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple and Outlook Calendars, Figma, Okta Single Sign-On, Vimeo, YouTube, Loom, Zoom, Bitbucket, Chrome, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Sentry, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts Chat, Intercom Box, Zendesk, Front, Clockify, Timely, Tmetric, TImeneye, PromoDone, TimeCamp, Time Doctor, Lambda Test, Due Focus, Embed Anything, Twilio, Bugsnag, Calendly, Miro, Discord, Tableau, Giphy, and more. ClickUp offers a public API to develop your own integrations, as well.
ClickUp is free for unlimited members and unlimited tasks with 100MB of storage included. Paid plans cost from $5/user/month and start with a free 30-day trial.
8. ProjectManager.com – Best for time tracking
ProjectManager.com is an agile product management software that blends both Agile and Waterfall frameworks for high flexibility. Users can choose what work style they like best, be it Gantt charts, task lists, Kanban boards, or a hybrid system. They have a particularly robust time tracking system that updates in real-time and offers a multitude of tags, groups, and labels by which to sort each entry with hyper-specific detail.
ProjectManager.com truly has a wonderful built-in time tracking and expenses management system; however, many time management features are limited to the higher tier subscription plans. Timesheets and holiday tracking unlock with the Team Plan ($20/user/month with a minimum of 10 users) and timesheet approvals, expenses, and budgeting unlocks with the Business Plan ($25/user/month with a minimum of 15 users).
ProjectManager.com boasts a lot of customization options that work well with both large and small-scale product development. Each project plan is super flexible, allowing for huge amounts of detail and unique variables based on your specific use case. Teams can take advantage of being able to tailor every task to reflect your specific Agile product’s needs. Their clean, robust portfolio dashboard lets you track multiple products at once.
ProjectManager.com integrates with Microsoft Project, Excel, Exchange, Office 365, Salesforce, Quickbooks, Xero, Dropbox, Desk.co, JIRA, HubSpot, Slack, Zendesk, Evernote, One Log-In, OneDrive, Google Suite and Gmail, and they also offer a powerful REST API to help you build against internal or external tools.
ProjectManager.com costs from $15/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial.
9. MeisterTask – Best for Kanban boards
MeisterTask is a user-friendly, feature-rich team PM tool that was named an Editor’s Choice in the Apple App Store and maintains a high 4.7/5 score on Google Play. They have task relationship charting, action automation, checklists, and recurring tasks, time tracking, and custom fields for data entry. Their Kanban board is straightforward to set up and very easy to maintain with easy drag-and-drop cards and simple point-and-click commands.
MeisterTask could offer more customization options for their Kanban cards, like color-coding tasks, for example. The few customizations that are available feel like they take one too many clicks to implement and often get lost in the menus. Some icons and buttons don’t have clear enough labels, leaving users with a bit of a guess-and-check strategy when getting started.
MeisterTask has a lot of Kanban board tweaks that make it stand out from other similar products. For example, attaching an image to a card will give a preview of that image rather than just the filename—a great addition for creative and visual teams. MeisterTask even has a lot of Trello’s “PowerUp” options built right into the tool, like time tracking, custom fields, and statistics and reports.
MeisterTask integrates with MindMeister, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Slack, Hangouts Chat, Spark, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, Outlook, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Workspace, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Mailbutler, Confluence, Github, Bugsnag, Bitbucket, IFTTT, MOCO, Paperform, PomoDone App, Harvest, Timely, and over two thousand more apps using a paid plan through Zapier.
MeisterTask is free for up to 3 projects (unlimited users) and paid plans start at $8.25/month and offer a free trial upon request.
10. Backlog – Best for software development teams
Backlog is a project and code management solution with a focus on issue logging, bug tracking, and version control, which makes it particularly adept at supporting software development teams. On top of that, they also offer Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and task lists to cover the day-to-day basics of leading an agile product development team. Utilize push notifications for new issues and drag-and-drop file attachments for high-speed iteration planning.
Other bug tracking tools often allow users to add and delete columns from their working board for different custom stages of the product development; Backlog, however, does not. Team members will also notice that Backlog also doesn’t have a way to filter by more than one category at a time—for example, you might be filtering by “type” and also want to filter by “date” but this is not currently possible (one will override the other).
You can tell pretty quickly that Backlog was made with Agile software dev teams in mind. Even Backlog’s free plan comes with issue tracking capabilities that can be entered in-app or pulled from an integrated email source. Code review and collaboration are available on all plans through Git, Subversion (SVN), and the app’s DIY wiki system. General Agile teams will feel welcomed in the app, too, but may want to start at the Standard Plan, which unlocks Gantt charts, burndown charts, and project templates for $100/month (unlimited users).
Backlog integrates with Typetalk, Cacoo, Nulab Pass, Slack, Redmine, Jira Importer, Jenkins, iCal Sync, Email importer, Google Sheets importer, and LambdaTest. You can also build your own integrations and add-ons with Backlog’s API.
Backlog is free for up to 10 users and 1 project. Paid plans cost from $30/month and come with a 30-day free trial.
Other Agile Product Management Solutions
Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list, if you need additional suggestions for software that hones the agile methodology for a product lifecycle.
- Zoho Sprints — Best for epics
- Craft — Best customer feedback portal
- ActiveCollab — Best for invoicing
- Productboard — Best for multi-product releases
- Pendo — Best for sentiment analysis
- Asana — Best for marketing teams
- Jira — Best for enterprise agile product management
- Easy Projects — Best for engineering teams
- AHA — Best for idea crowdsourcing
- Avion — Best for concept testing
- Qualtrics — Best for B2B
- GoodDay — Best for product portfolios
- Indicative — Best KPI dashboard
- Canny — Best for feature request tracking
- EnjoyHQ — Best for ResearchOps
- Airfocus — Best for product team retrospectives
- Roadmunk — Best for product requirements prioritization
- Yodiz — Best for startups
- Obo — Best for agile teams who use Jira
- Hansoft Perforce — Best fully-supported planning methodologies
What Do You Think About These Agile Product Management Tools?
There’s something here for everyone, whether you are looking for a tool that does the best creative roadmapping or has a high-quality feedback system, or something entirely different. Have you tried out any of the agile development software above for your product strategy? As a product owner, what functionality do you look for in product and project management apps? Are there any product development tools you would add to this list?
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